Roxio announced the latest release of its popular Creator suite of digital media applicatons. The new Easy Media Creator 10 has been updated to support the latest file formats, media types and web services, and a few new bells and whistles have been added to help absolute newbies start creating things with their photos and videos. The software, which costs $100 and is available now for Windows XP and Vista from Roxio's website, is obviously designed for the casual average user (like your dad, who maybe is just discovering the world of digital video) but it does have enough functionality to make the hardcore media consumers out there happy.
Creator's batch conversion tools are impressive. Feed it just about any audio file (MP3, WMA, AAC, Flac, Ogg, etc.) and it will cross-encode the song to the format of your choosing. It does the same for video, accepting and encoding VC-1, MPEG, AVI, H.264 and WMV among others. There are also Vista widgets that let you do drag-and-drop cross-encoding on the Vista desktop.

Roxio director of product management Tom Vaughan says the company has even optimized its software to squeeze extra performance out of the most popular CPUs when encoding HD video. Since HD encoding is typically quite time-consuming, this boost to base processor performance will be welcomed by HD enthusiasts. Vaughan also says support for the up-and-coming AVCHD video format will added before the end of the year.

The video editing tools are easy enough to use, as are the photo editors. For the true novices, there are several wizards and tools which walk you through things like burning DVDs, resizing photos and syncing the media on your various devices. For the more seasoned out there, it's worth noting that you shouldn't expect anything on the level of Final Cut or Photoshop. While robust, the tools included in Creator 10 are meant for serious hobbyists, not pros. In fact, the $100 price tag places the software closer to iLife 08 than anything else. There are some obvious differences -- Creator 10 doesn't have a multitracking audio app like GarageBand, but it does have the SmartSound easy music creator with generates a royalty-free soundtrack for your video.